B.I.BARNATO, Harry Raymond (inscription reads: "To my darling Mabel, the dearest child in the world, who I shall always love and worship and whose love I shall always cherish more than anything in the world...Woolfie? Woolfin? ..I can't make out name)

The books high lghited in light blue are in a collection in New York. These are the ones that will be given to Staten Island

MOLLY O (SENNETT 1921)

JOAN OF PLATTSBURG (GOLDWYN 1918)

Reading Mabel Normand's Library

by Mark Lynn Anderson

An investigation of popular accounts of Mabel Normand's library considers the convergence of the intellectual and the star. Normand's persona as a working-class woman and movie star enabled her claim to new forms of cultural authority in the 1910s, in turn rapidly attenuated by the implementation of regulatory discourses about motion pictures and other products of mass culture, making those products subject to various forms of verification and institutional certification.

A PERFECT 36 (GOLDWYN 1918)

MICKEY (MNFF 1918)

PROFESSOR MARK LYNN ANDERSON

Mark Lynn Anderson is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.Interested in the roles of media institutions in American society between the two World Wars, he has written essays on celebrity scandal, film censorship and early film education.His book, Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in the 1920s, is forthcoming from University of California Press.Contact: E-mail: andersml@pitt.edu

Writer and taste-maker Elinor Glyn performed a kind of paradoxical labour to define her authorial signature well beyond that traditionally accorded screenwriters. Thus Glyn cultivated power outside the role of author through performance, supervision of production if not direction, commentary about Hollywood, and in some cases control over casting or the moulding of the performances of others. But these other areas of authority themselves arise from the value of the Glyn narrative as something highly recognizable during the 1920s.

This study analyses the discourse surrounding celebrity portraits of Lois Weber and her husband and collaborator, Phillips Smalley, arguing that metaphors of marital harmony that sought to explain the couple's creative partnership ultimately could not contain the challenges their working relationship presented to dominant models of gender relations. Significant though Weber's films were, the director's elevated reputation had as much to do with the kinds of pictures she made, as it did with the type of woman she presented herself to be – married, matronly, and decidedly middle-class.

An examination of the throngs of 'film-smitten girls' who arrived in early Hollywood in search of stardom, which demonstrates how the influx of single, transitory women to Los Angeles prompted early attempts to regulate not only female labour, but private conduct as well. The 'problem' of the 'extra girl' in Hollywood became not only an important labour issue but a key ideological concern as well, because it foregrounded how the industry's interests and economic power negotiated with civic, cultural, and social elites a 'proper place' for movies, especially the right role female spectators might play in relation to the cinema and the act of film consumption.

Through extensive research into local newspapers throughout the United States in the early 'teens, the author chronicles the work of little-known columnist Gertrude Price, demonstrating how she crafted an appeal to female movie fans while highlighting the powerful roles played by women in the early industry.

Through the example of Iris Barry's film criticism, the author underlines the significant role that women played in articulating serious film culture. Barry's writing, argues Wasson, comprises a method by which to understand the ways in which gender has figured historically in questions of identifying and valuing a range of women's work and forms of cultural production that exist outside of filmmaking per se, yet nonetheless shape ideas undergirding the meaning and significance of specific films, and of cinema in general.

This paper pays close attention to the serial and 'cinematic' narratives produced in the British press of the 'teens in order to display film's widening reach as a narrative mode mingling action, sentiment, and gender and to historicize debates about genre in film studies. Many filmmakers, publicists and journalists in the 1910s fully understood that melodrama was a radically hybrid form, yet they did not have the same semantic anxieties about juxtaposing multiple, non-hierarchical definitions of melodrama as later genre historians.

The trope of women's 'automobility' in three films centered around female drivers is examined in order to chart the changing fortunes of women's creative control in early Hollywood, looking in turn at Mabel Normand, Nell Shipman and Frances Marion. Whether behind the wheel or behind the camera, women's mastery of exciting new technologies offered a spectacular image of New Womanhood as both practical power and thrilling adventure.

Alice Guy Blaché's onscreen depictions of sound prompt an enquiry into this suppressed realm of early cinema, which often figures marginalized social groups. Women's increased public presence and vocality and the suffrage debates are shown to be expressed obliquely in Guy Blaché's work, through extra-diegetic visual references and the imagination of sound.

Through her reading of Greta Garbo's star persona, the author interrogates the dominant theoretical paradigms that have been used to characterize female figures of the period, suggestively arguing how Garbo's ambiguity challenges these models.

An investigation of popular accounts of Mabel Normand's library considers the convergence of the intellectual and the star. Normand's persona as a working-class woman and movie star enabled her claim to new forms of cultural authority in the 1910s, in turn rapidly attenuated by the implementation of regulatory discourses about motion pictures and other products of mass culture, making those products subject to various forms of verification and institutional certification.

The miscellany of film history – from scrapbooks to marginalia to cookbooks – may lead towards a more explicit understanding of the collaborative work that goes on between the historian and the subject of her analysis. Arguing that the "miscellany" is a kind of methodological model, The author argues that women's histories are inevitably dispersed across genres, forms, spaces. Drawing from these various forms and spaces, our scholarly work is based on miscellaneous acts of collection and on the collections of miscellany.